Sunday, March 14, 2010

Blogger Manifesto Project: Manifesto #3

My name is Ana. Tara has asked for my manifesto. There are so many ideas and things I'm obsessed with; so many declarations I could have made. But here is the one that made it - the one that is most important to me. A manifesto on time. Care to spend a few minutes of yours with it?

Time is perception. It flies, it grinds, in very long work meetings it feels like it has suspended itself completely, trapping you like a fly in amber.

Time is always measured. Seconds, hours, days, months, and years. It is a framework for our lives in which our language is even divided into past, present and future tenses. When you are stranded without a means of telling time, it makes you feel uncomfortable and uneasy. It can even amount to torture. The measurement of time anchors you to your life.

Time can obsess people. The anticipation of it, the keeping of it, the passing of it. Some plan their time out very carefully with calendars, alarm clocks, lists and five year plans. Others resolutely turn their backs on this and drift on by, declaring they have no mission and no ambition, that they are just content to see what comes. Both both approaches spring from the same source - the realisation that we do not have much time (therefore we need to plan it or as such we need to enjoy it while it lasts).

And isn't that the rub? That no matter what we think of time, no matter what we believe, we all know that time will only ever leave us behind.

And if we substitute the word "love" for "life", Yehuda Amichai still speaks true: Love is finished again, like a profitable citrus season or like an archeological dig that turned up from deep inside the earth turbulent things that wanted to be forgotten. Love is finished again. When a tall building is torn down and the debris cleared away, you stand there on the square empty lot, saying: What a small space that building stood on with all its many floors and people.(extract from Love is Finished Again by Yehuda Amichai )